"When people get an RSS feed, they need not go through standard Web site navigation patterns that we are accustomed to tracking. They look at just what they want, when they want."

The same claim could be made for the early web. The problem is not looking at what you want. The problem is finding what you want to look at.

What (I Hope) Is Next For RSS News Readers

RSS news readers help you find and read content which is of interest to you. They face challenges.

RSS Advertisements

News readers will become less useful if they cannot help you filter out RSS advertisements.

Redundant Articles

I already wish news readers could perform higher-order aggregation. My subscriptions reflect my interests, so they have significant content overlap. Just this morning, for example, I must have seen about ten different news items all providing roughly the same information about Mighty Mouse.

I wish my news reader could at least identify and group together "duplicate" articles such as these, so I could deal with them all at once. Click on one to read it, mark the others en masse as having been read, move on.

I wish I could use my system's standard search tools (Spotlight for me, who knows what for Longhorn^WVista users) to search through old feed articles.

Not to be a shill for Brent Simmons, but the full version of NetNewsWire seems to have begun to address these wishes.

It's nice that my most original ideas have already been had by others.